Evidence of meeting #11 for Electoral Reform in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was political.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Leslie Seidle  Research Director, Canada's Changing Federal Community, Institute for Research on Public Policy
Larry LeDuc  Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Hugo Cyr  Dean, Faculty of Political Science and Law, Université du Québec à Montréal, As an Individual

2 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Good afternoon to all committee members.

Welcome to all the witnesses here this afternoon.

We welcome Leslie Seidle, Research Director, Canada's Changing Federal Community. We welcome, as individuals, Larry LeDuc, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, and Hugo Cyr, Dean, Faculty of Political Science and Law at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

I will briefly touch on the witnesses' credentials.

Professor Leslie Seidle is research director for the Canada's changing federal community program at the Institute for Research on Public Policy, and a public policy consultant. He was also senior research coordinator for the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing, and is author of Rethinking the Delivery of Public Services to Citizens and numerous articles on immigration issues, electoral and constitutional reform, public management, and political finance.

Professor Larry LeDuc, as I mentioned, is professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. His publications include Comparing Democracies, Dynasties and Interludes, The Politics of Direct Democracy, Absent Mandate, How Voters Change, and Political Choice in Canada, as well as numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as Electoral Studies, Party Politics, Political Science, and Canadian Journal of Political Science.

Dean Hugo Cyr is a member of the centre of interdisciplinary research on diversity and democracy, of the Quebec association of constitutional law, and of the UNESCO chair for the study of the philosophical foundations of justice in democratic society. He was a visiting scholar at the European Academy of Legal Theory in Brussels and has served as legal aid with the Honourable Justice Ian Binnie of the Supreme Court of Canada.

So I think we're going to have a very interesting, stimulating, and rich discussion this afternoon. I believe our witnesses have 10 minutes each, and then what we typically do is have two rounds of questions in which every member around the table gets to ask a question and you get to answer for five minutes. So the Q and A for each member is five minutes, and then we do a second round in the same format.

Without further ado, we'll start with Mr. Seidle.

2 p.m.

Dr. Leslie Seidle Research Director, Canada's Changing Federal Community, Institute for Research on Public Policy

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the committee for their kind invitation to contribute to their important work. I can see that you are working hard this summer.

I will start by saying a few words about the Institute for Research on Public Policy.

Founded in 1972, the Institute is a national independent, bilingual, nonprofit organization. Although it publishes studies recommending changes to public policy, it does not issue opinions on such issues.

In that respect, the comments I will be making today are mine alone and do not constitute a position taken by the IRPP.

Before I address some of this committee's mandate, I want to express a concern about a broad question that is not addressed in the mandate, namely, what is the overall objective that a new federal voting system would serve? What is the problem that is meant to be rectified? Put another way, how would Canada's democratic life be changed, one assumes for the better, by replacing the present voting system with another? To me this question hasn't been answered and I think it's front and centre in the work you have in front of you.

If you look a little further for an answer, you find in the Liberal Party platform from last year three sentences on electoral reform, one of which is the commitment that the next election will be the last one under the present electoral system. There's a heading before that sentence and it says “We will make every vote count”. This doesn't take us very far.

The Minister of Democratic Institutions has referred to the present voting system as “antiquated”. By this I assume she means it is no longer suitable for the purpose, rather like a piece of furniture that no longer goes with new decor in a room. But what is the purpose that the word “antiquated” is being linked to? Although political institutions need to be adapted to changing circumstances and we have done this in Canada in many ways, including through our federal arrangements, I believe they should be assessed on criteria other than age. After all, continuity and stability are important virtues in democratic arrangements.

Now turning to your terms of reference, you are asked to study viable alternate voting systems to replace the present system and “to assess the extent to which the options identified could advance” the principles for electoral reform that are enumerated in the terms of reference. When I read them over, it seemed to me—and I concluded this quite quickly—a logical impossibility for your committee to identify one alternative system that would serve all the principles equally well.

But maybe you're not working to that end. After all, your terms of reference referred to options with an “s”, not a single option. This leads me to my first main point today, that there's a need to prioritize the principles that alternative electoral systems are meant to serve. If you present one alternative, you should know what that alternative is meaning to do. If you present more than one, the same argument follows for the other systems.

I'm not going to prioritize those principles for you, I don't have time to do that. I'm going to engage in a more modest exercise today that begins by choosing—and rewording slightly—two of them that, in my view, should be given high priority. The first one is strengthening the representation and inclusion of Canada's diversity. The second is encouraging voter choice and participation.

The first one concerns in part representation of various groups within Canadian society. I'm not talking about party representation here, because I know that my colleague will be covering that and you've heard from, or will be hearing from, various people like Henry Milner and Dennis Pilon. But the representation of groups is not a mere counting exercise. We look and we see how many visible minorities have been elected in comparison to the population: that's valid. Why do we do that? We do it because as the composition of a decision-making body changes, so do the decisions. If we value responsiveness in decision-making, we should be concerned when certain groups are not well represented in our legislatures.

Let's start with women and see how well they fare in this House and other legislatures elected under different systems. You have two tables that have been handed out and if you look at the first one, I'll make a few points.

The first table is about gender representation. We see that in the four countries with majoritarian systems—Canada, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Australia—there is no example in which women represent even one-third of the members of the lower house, so they're not doing very well there.

In proportional and mixed systems, only a few of which I've included here, women are often better represented, sometimes significantly so, as in Sweden where 44% of the national Parliament are female. However, this is not always the case.

I've put in Hungary. Hungary is a democracy. It's having some problems at the moment, but nevertheless it's part of the European Union, and it was once a vigorous democracy before it was part of the Communist bloc, and so on. In Hungary only 10% of the members are women, and there's a proportional system in Hungary as well.

Taking the single transferable vote, there is only one major country that uses that for its lower house, Ireland, and women count for 22% there, a bit lower than the rate in Canada and a bit higher than in the U.S.

Now, turning to the second table that I handed out, but still on the principle of representation and inclusion, here I've provided data on racial and indigenous minorities in the four oldest Westminster-type democracies and the U.S. We can't look at PR systems in the same kind of detail, mostly because either we don't have data, as in the case of France, or there are no indigenous peoples, or they're almost not significant, or they're not measured, so I have taken countries mostly like ours.

In Canada, visible minorities are now quite well represented, with 14% of MPS compared with 19% of the population. That's from the 2011 National Household Survey.

This is considerably better than the case in the U.K. where non-whites are 13% of the population but have only 6% of House seats. In Australia the contrast is even sharper, although the measure is a little different. Some 28% of the population was born outside of the country. Now, a large share of these people are non-white, because of the source countries for Australian immigration. Following the 2013 election—we don't yet have data for the last one—only 11% of MPs were born outside Australia, so there is an almost 1:3 ratio there.

Looking at indigenous peoples, we have three examples. In New Zealand we have the Maori, who are now 14% of the population but have 18% of the seats in the House of Representatives. This is partly because there are designated seats in New Zealand for the Maori. There are at the moment seven of those seats.

In Australia there is only one indigenous member, and that member was elected in 2013. In fact, this was the first aboriginal ever elected as a member of the Australian House of Representatives.

In Canada, with which I'm sure you're familiar, we're doing relatively well, though still not comparably with the population, which is 4.3% indigenous, and 3% of the House are now indigenous members. There has been progress, as there has with visible minorities. There was significant progress between the 2011 election and the very latest one.

What does what I've just run through tell us?

First of all, and this is the first of the two additional main points I want to leave with you, voting systems are not determinist. They are not a set of gears that turn one way, and they are not always going to give you the same result when you put in the same kinds of input as you would in a factory. Just to take one example, we see that PR is often associated with better representation of women, but this is not automatic. I'll have a word about that when I conclude.

Secondly—and this one I really want to emphasize—political parties' rules and commitments, particularly at the candidate nomination stage, have an important influence on the representation of diversity, including representation of women. In Sweden, parties have for a long time placed a premium on nominating women. Some of them have voluntary quotas, and they place them relatively high on their lists, and therefore they are represented almost in parity in the Swedish Parliament.

This is a better result than happens in some other countries, because in those other countries often women are not placed as high on the list, and the result is not as favourable, all other things being equal.

Turning to the racial and indigenous minorities, we don't have as large a sample to draw on, but there's a point about our own system that needs to be remembered there, which is that we have moved in Canada, under a system which is antiquated, according to one person, and maybe some other people, to a stage where racial and indigenous minorities, visible minorities, are represented almost in relation to their share of the population. Our system doesn't do that badly. We don't do as well on women. One of the main reasons that this happened is that the parties, particularly the Liberal Party, and the NDP also, put up greater numbers of candidates from visible minorities and from indigenous backgrounds.

I'm going to conclude with just a short comment on the other principle that I mentioned, encouraging voter choice and participation. This is a huge area, but I'll just make a few points.

The alternative vote, as in Australia—I assume you know what these are all about, so I won't explain them—allows voters to rank candidates, but there's only one candidate per party. In some ways you have a little more choice because you're doing a ranking as opposed to just putting one “x”, so it gets a few points on choice.

2:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Mr. Seidle, if you could wrap up in the next 20 seconds, that would be appreciated. There'll be questions after and there will be lots of time to explore.

2:10 p.m.

Research Director, Canada's Changing Federal Community, Institute for Research on Public Policy

Dr. Leslie Seidle

I just have three bullet points otherwise the logic will be lost.

2:10 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Sure.

2:10 p.m.

Research Director, Canada's Changing Federal Community, Institute for Research on Public Policy

Dr. Leslie Seidle

The single transferable vote allows ranking, but it also allows people to go within the party lists, so their choice is greater there. Closed proportional representation has a limited choice because people vote only for the list. It's a bit like ours: you vote for one candidate, they vote for one list, and the order on the list determines who gets elected according to the support for the parties. In PR systems with open lists, you can go within the lists, and in some systems you can actually go within the lists of other parties, so you have greater choice there. Then in mixed systems you have that similar choice, depending on how the proportional side is organized, but you also have the vote for the single member MP.

I'll just conclude with the point that if you were to assess on the basis of choice, the alternative vote wouldn't give you much of an advantage over where we are right now. I don't use that as a way of saying where we are right now is totally broken, because we are making some interesting forms of progress.

PR with closed lists, also, to my mind, should be rejected. If we are going to change our system, why would we move to a system where you have only one vote for the closed party list?

Thank you very much for your time and attention.

2:15 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you very much, Mr. Seidle.

We'll continue with Professor LeDuc, for 10 minutes, please.

2:15 p.m.

Professor Larry LeDuc Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, As an Individual

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to members of the committee for inviting me here today.

I was trying to decide how to start, particularly in a 10-minute beginning. I was going to start by saying that I think it's very unlikely that electoral reform will happen in Canada. And then I thought that was too pessimistic a note to begin on, given all your hard work on this topic, and also because I'm a reformer. I would like to see it happen, but I'm very pessimistic about the prospects.

I thought instead that I'll be slightly more cheerful and simply emphasize that it is really difficult to accomplish, in almost any jurisdiction. It isn't a Canadian problem. It's the problem that you run into when you're trying to change an institution like an electoral system that people have grown up with and are accustomed to.

Whenever I make this argument to students or to others in the course of the various debates in Canada, someone always brings up New Zealand. They say that New Zealand did it, why can't we? I'm always happy when they bring up New Zealand because usually they know a bit about New Zealand, but not very much.

In New Zealand, it's important for us to know what they did and how they did it. It is a case study on electoral reform because they actually accomplished it. It took them nine years. It began with a government that came to power. The new prime minister boldly announced the end of “first past the post”. Then nine years later, after three elections, a royal commission, a parliamentary committee, and two referendums on the topic, they accomplished it. If you guys are in for the long haul, then it's possible that you might be able to follow the New Zealand track, as long as you can identify its various twists and turns along the way. But New Zealand doesn't show us how easy it is to reform a first past the post system that's been well established; it shows us how hard it is.

I'll come back to New Zealand later maybe in the Q and A because there are a couple of lessons we can take from New Zealand besides the sheer pessimism. Those lessons are about the process. Someone is sure to ask me about a referendum, for example. We can look at how the referendums fit into the New Zealand process and what they accomplished or didn't accomplish.

We can also look at Japan, but I don't have the time today to talk a lot about Japan. Japan is the other major democracy that did accomplish electoral reform. It took them 20 years, not just only nine years. The debate in Japan began in 1973, and 20 years later in 1993 they got it done. The process was very different from New Zealand. It took place solely within the parliament and solely via bargaining among the various political parties. A watershed election broke the grip of the LDP on Japanese politics in the early 1990s. The LDP government was succeeded by a seven-party coalition. That seven-party coalition essentially became the vehicle for accomplishing electoral reform, but only after they were able to secure the agreement of all seven parties. It was a long, difficult, complicated drive to consensus. They also got it done using a different process.

I could also talk about some of the provincial cases in Canada. Those are cases of failure, by and large, where they started out on an optimistic note and then ended up not being able to accomplish the reforms. Just mentioning these cases leads me to one of the major points that I want to make in my presentation and discussion today, which is to emphasize process over substance, especially at the stage that this committee is at in its deliberations.

There's a tendency in electoral reform debates—and I've seen this many times—for people to start with the system that they like or think they like. They say, ”Oh, STV, that's pretty good” or “Maybe we should have PR” or “What about MMP? It works nicely in Germany.” They're attracted to a model because they know something about that model and its virtues, and then they try to develop a process that would get you there, and the preference drives the process. So people will say, “Well, this one might sell” or “We might be able to get there by doing X and Y.”

I think it should be the other way around. I think if you start with process and don't get trapped into discussing too much the virtues and vices of various models, particularly models in other countries, you have a better chance of success.

I think this committee, to its credit, has already to some degree started that way, first because of the representation on the committee and second because of the enunciation of the principles on which your discussion is based. I suspect, however, that lurking in the background is a preference among many people for a particular system and a tendency to gravitate toward that discussion or at least to gravitate there too quickly. You're going to end up there eventually, of course, but that's not where we need to be. If we could get consensus on a process, then we could use that process to build consensus on reform. It's much harder to do it the other way around. I think that's one of the things the Japanese case tells us.

That brings me to the point on which I want to conclude, which is simply a restatement of what my colleague Peter Russell said to the committee yesterday, and that is that the basic principle of an electoral system should be to reflect the voices of the voters as expressed in the election. That's the core principle. It's also the core principle of democracy, and I thought he stated that principle very well.

We're often looking for electoral systems to do a lot more than that: we're trying to second-guess what the voters want or think they want or what their votes mean. But if the election gives you a reading on what the voters have chosen or what their thinking is at the time of the election and a system can then efficiently translate those voices into representation in the Parliament, an election then is not just a one-day affair that chooses a government; it is a continuing process by which the voices of those voters continue to be reflected in the representative process.

That's the principle I would stress the most, and it's partly why I will try to make a case, which I do in my brief—and I'm not going to talk about the brief in this opening presentation, but I will be happy to talk about it later—for list PR: I believe that list PR is the system that most efficiently performs that core task of an electoral system; also because it is the most widely used electoral system in the world and therefore we ought to take a look at it. Why start with hybrid models or models that are not used in very many places?

Every time I get involved in one of these debates, I hear a lot about STV, for example. It seems to be a fascination of certain of my academic colleagues in particular, especially the ones from British Columbia. There's nothing wrong with STV. STV is a very interesting model, but it's a largely theoretical model, and it's only used in Ireland and Malta. I probably couldn't pick out two cases that are much more different from Canada than those two. Consequently, the problem with STV that I often have is that we don't have enough empirical evidence on it and the way it might work in a geographically large, multicultural society like Canada.

We have plenty of evidence on PR systems of other kinds, because they're used in all kinds of different countries, large and small, east and west. As the most widely used and also most adaptable electoral system, adapting list PR is not just choosing someone else's electoral system; it is choosing a model that can then be adapted to the Canadian environment and made to work in the Canadian environment to accomplish many of the objectives that this committee has felt are the objectives an electoral system in Canada in 2016 should strive to accomplish.

I'm sure my friend and colleague Henry Milner already made the case for PR this morning, because he's been making it for years, and I cite him many times in footnotes to things that I've written. I won't restate what he has said, but I would certainly reinforce what I suspect he probably said. I think we have paid too little attention to the principles of list PR in the Canadian debates and too much attention to hybrid models that are theoretically interesting but not as proven in practice as many of the PR systems of Europe and elsewhere.

I'll stop there. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

2:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you very much, Professor LeDuc, for that very interesting approach to the issue, which is, I think, one that we haven't really seen yet. Thank you for contributing to broadening our perspective.

We will now go to Professor Cyr, s'il vous plaît.

2:25 p.m.

Professor Hugo Cyr Dean, Faculty of Political Science and Law, Université du Québec à Montréal, As an Individual

Thank you very much for your invitation. You are certainly keeping busy in the middle of a very hot summer, which is greatly appreciated. You are working for all Canadians.

This special committee is mandated to study electoral reforms in order to replace the current first-past-the-post system with another that would increase public confidence among Canadians in that their democratic will, as expressed by their votes, will be fairly translated.

The new electoral system that will emerge from this reform process could result in more frequent minority or even coalition governments. A number of individuals have expressed the concern that this could encourage more frequent general elections and lead to political instability.

However, recent events in Scotland and Wales show that it is possible to modernize and streamline our parliamentary system while maintaining its intrinsic traditions and political stability. The parliaments of Scotland and Wales both elect their respective members through a form of mixed-member proportional representation known as the additional member system. While they have had minority and coalition governments, these two parliaments have not had to hold elections more often than every four or five years since they were created, namely in 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011 and 2016.

The parliamentary system possesses a number of simple and proven legal measures to stabilize minority and coalition governments. Drawing from measures implemented by the United Kingdom and several other countries, I would like to suggest some minor modifications that could be made to our procedures to ensure the stability and political legitimacy of the governments formed following the anticipated electoral reforms.

These changes will also have advantage of bringing more clarity and transparency to our procedures. They will serve an educational purpose because it will be important to ensure that any changes made to our electoral system are accompanied by the public's better understanding of our political system. They might incidentally enhance the role and significance of a member of Parliament.

I will list four proposed changes that were all inspired by concrete examples drawn from other countries. Please refer to the appendix of my report for a list of the legislative and constitutional provisions on which they are based.

First, I propose to amend the Standing Orders of the House of Commons to provide for the nomination of the Prime Minister by a vote in the House of Commons, to be held between the election of the Speaker of the House and the Speech from the Throne—with the appointment of the Prime Minister remaining the prerogative of the Crown, of course.

This proposal is based on the examples of Scotland, Wales, Germany and Spain, where, when there is no clear majority government, they make sure to have a clear decision on who should form the government and who should be its leader—who will have to appear before the Governor General to form government.

Second, I propose to establish the requirements for voting on non-confidence motions through legislation or amendments to the Standing Orders of the House of Commons and restrict these motions to what are known as “constructive” non-confidence motions or, at a minimum, explicitly provide for the possibility of a successor government following a non-confidence vote.

Let's start with the requirement for a constructive non-confidence motion. This type of confidence motion is required in Belgium, Spain, and Germany, for example. I would specifically refer you to the Spanish example, where the use of the non-confidence motion has been clearly regulated. Non-confidence motions may be moved a limited number of times and only during a certain period.

What is a constructive non-confidence motion? When a motion is passed to indicate that the House has lost confidence in the government, the motion must simultaneously provide for a successor government. Should the motion pass, this successor government automatically receives the confidence of the House. This is a mechanism to prevent the opposition parties from joining forces to overthrow a government and from taking advantage of an early election to increase their number of seats.

With regard to the possibility of a successor government should the House of Commons pass a non-confidence motion, I relied on the United Kingdom legislation. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act provides that where the government is defeated on a vote of confidence, an election will not be called until 14 days later, if there is no subsequent resolution to restore confidence in that same government or in the successor government that would have been formed in the meantime.

Third, I propose to amend section 56.1 of the Canada Elections Act to allow for the early dissolution of Parliament with the approval of two-thirds of the members of the House of Commons. This enhances the role of members of Parliament. Once again, this proposal is based on an example of the British Fixed-term Parliaments Act. This is intended to give more weight to members of Parliament.

My fourth proposal builds on the third; in other words, if it can be done for the dissolution of Parliament, it can be done for prorogation as well. We can also make this requirement mandatory.

Therefore my fourth proposal is to amend the Standing Orders of the House of Commons so that asking for Parliament to be prorogued or dissolved without first obtaining the approval of the House of Commons automatically results in a loss of confidence in the Prime Minister. Consequently, the Governor General would not be bound by a prime minister's advice requesting the early dissolution or prorogation of Parliament without first obtaining the approval of the House of Commons.

I emphasize that the current Standing Orders of the House of Commons stipulate that the election of the Speaker of the House does not constitute a question of confidence. The current Standing Orders already allow for some say about confidence.

The Standing Orders of the National Assembly of Quebec explicitly stipulate what are the issues that may be subject to a vote of confidence. There is a precedent in one of the provinces. In British law there is a clear provision on the conditions under which the vote of confidence can be exercised.

We would have the opportunity to provide for the specific conditions under which a government, which would be a minority government, could request the dissolution or prorogation of Parliament, to help stabilize the whole situation.

In closing, to ensure that this reform is successful, and while we are engaged in a major change, we have to consider an important public educational issue. A study showed that most Canadians think that they vote directly to elect a prime minister. Therefore there is a need for an education component to clarify how our system works.

Following the example of the United Kingdom and New Zealand, I propose that we capitalize on this electoral reform to clarify, in some sort of Cabinet manual drafted by consensus, all the expectations associated with forming a government and proroguing Parliament.

The British experience showed us how effective and useful such a manual can be when in 2010 none of the parties won a majority of seats. That evening, there were no rushed media calls of the type, “If the trend holds, the next government will be formed by...”. The political parties were given the time they needed to negotiate among themselves who would form the next government, rather than allowing the media to decide that very evening who would be the next prime minister. This is a step forward for democracy.

2:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you.

We will start the two rounds of questions with Ms. Sahota.

2:35 p.m.

Liberal

Ruby Sahota Liberal Brampton North, ON

Thank you, Mr. Cyr, Dr. Seidle, and Dr. LeDuc for being here today. You all have excellent credentials, and they're quite diverse, so I think we'll get some interesting discussion going.

This question is for you, Dr. LeDuc. You have suggested in your previous work that a referendum may not be the best way to engage citizens. Could you suggest some other ways in which we can properly engage people in this process?

2:35 p.m.

Prof. Larry LeDuc

I don't think I've said anything particularly negative about referendums per se. It depends on what you want out of a referendum. One of the lessons I wanted to try to draw out of the New Zealand case is that the referendums—and they actually had two of them—were part of a larger process. They came at different times, so the debate in New Zealand went on for a long time.

Now whether it would have been different with or without referendums is hard to say; it's a counterfactual we can't really test. However, a referendum could fit in somewhere.

I think the model that's been proven not to work—and not just on this issue, but on other kinds of constitutional or quasi-constitutional issues as well—is where a small group behind closed doors comes up with a proposal then tosses it out there for the people to vote on, and in a three- or four-week campaign it's usually possible to pretty much put an end to it.

2:35 p.m.

Liberal

Ruby Sahota Liberal Brampton North, ON

You published a paper, have you not, on 12 different shortcomings or deficiencies that referendums have had or can have?

2:35 p.m.

Prof. Larry LeDuc

Yes, have had or can have, but that doesn't mean that they have to.

2:35 p.m.

Liberal

Ruby Sahota Liberal Brampton North, ON

Can you list some of those shortcomings?

2:35 p.m.

Prof. Larry LeDuc

My negative example...I wrote that paper right around the time of the British referendum on the alternative vote. You have to understand, first of all, the government's purpose—or at least the Conservative half of the government's purpose—in that referendum was to basically defeat the proposal. That was its agenda. Second, the campaign was almost as chaotic as the Brexit campaign: loaded with disinformation. I'll give you a little example. This is more of an anecdote, I guess, but it says what I mean.

They won. They tried to have some controls on the British campaign in 2011—spending controls as well as advertising controls and so on. The campaign started on a particular date, when the rules came into effect. On day one of the campaign, the leader of the “no” campaign held a press conference, and she announced that they were against AV because it would cost three billion pounds to implement it. People had no idea what they were talking about. But the signal beginning of the campaign was not whether this was a good system or a bad system or desirable or an improvement or anything; rather, it was this out-of-left-field assertion that it was going to be very expensive.

Then, they tried to figure this out over the next few days. It turned out that what she was saying was that they would need voting machines to implement it, and the purchase of voting machines for the whole country would be very, very expensive. Well, it took three weeks, basically, to get rid of that assertion, but the damage had already been done.

I wrote a piece on a blog at that time, before I wrote the paper that you've referenced, which referred to that as the disinformation campaign. The main tactic that was used to defeat the proposal was simply disinformation. You can put out this nonsense, in many cases, and it sticks. It sticks, and you don't have enough time to recover from it in a short campaign.

That's the kind of risk of a referendum. In the piece I wrote that you quoted—and thank you for citing it—the point I wanted to make is that referendums, to be effective as a democratic device, have to be more deliberative. You have to really engage citizens and get them to seriously think about or deliberate an issue. That takes time, it takes information, and it often takes a very extensive publicly funded information campaign. But referendums are contests to win. When you get involved in a short referendum campaign, one side or the other is trying to win, and we saw that again with Brexit.

Disinformation is the main vehicle. We're used to negative campaigning in elections. There's plenty of negative campaigning in referendums as well. It's a very, very effective tactic. If you're setting out to defeat a proposal, disinformation is one of your best tools. So I tried to think about how to limit that, or prevent it, if possible.

July 27th, 2016 / 2:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Mr. Kenney.

2:40 p.m.

Conservative

Jason Kenney Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you to all three of our witnesses for being with us on this humid Ottawa day and for the wisdom you're shedding on this very important subject.

I was very pleased, particularly, Professor LeDuc, with your exhortation for us to focus on the process at the beginning and not rush into becoming partisans of our own preferred models. You've given us historic precedent where that's gone wrong.

As I read it, in most comparable jurisdictions, some of which you've cited, such as New Zealand, but also British Columbia and Ontario and, to some extent, Prince Edward Island, there was a more gradual and indirect process to arrive at a decision than what is being proposed here. As far as I understand it, what's being proposed is a parliamentary committee making a recommendation, which may or may not be accepted by the cabinet, which will then put forward legislation. That seems to me rather pre-emptory as compared to the experience of other jurisdictions and runs the risk of bypassing the kind of democratic consent and legitimacy that I think is broadly understood is necessary to pursue electoral reform.

Yesterday, we had one witness testify that he felt, according to the Jennings test, that there is now a constitutional convention in Canada requiring a referendum in order to endorse electoral reform. Professor Peter Russell said whether or not there's a constitutional convention is an abstract question, but it's a requirement in terms of political legitimacy. Could all three of the witnesses comment on those remarks that we heard yesterday?

2:40 p.m.

Prof. Larry LeDuc

I'm not sure I would use the word “requirement”. If it's a constitutional question, the constitutional lawyers are better qualified to comment on that than I am. I've heard the words “constitutional architecture” tossed around more recently and that goes in circles, and no one is quite sure what that means, including me. Whether the court would pick up a concept like that and use it to express an opinion, I'm just not sure.

We've only had three referendums in our entire history: two of them have been on public policy questions, and one of them has been on a constitutional proposal—

2:45 p.m.

Conservative

Jason Kenney Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB

You mean nationally.

2:45 p.m.

Prof. Larry LeDuc

National referendums, yes.

Constructing an argument that it is a requirement somehow of a major change is a bit of a stretch for me. Whether it's a good idea along the line you were suggesting to build legitimacy, that's a normative question. We could probably kick that back and forth. I think building legitimacy is certainly one of the criteria that's been mentioned in the committee documents, and a referendum could be a tool to build legitimacy, but you have to think about how to use it, how to make it do that, because there's nothing in referendums inherently that automatically makes them do that.

Citizens' assemblies, of course, have been the tool chosen in a couple of the provinces. I was very close to the Ontario citizens' assembly. I thought it did a terrific job in terms of deliberating the issue. It was really inspiring for a student of democracy like me to see 102 people in a room, who came in knowing almost nothing about this topic, often with some preconceptions or misconceptions about it, and watch them build consensus.

2:45 p.m.

Conservative

Jason Kenney Conservative Calgary Midnapore, AB

I just want to make sure the other witnesses get a chance to....

2:45 p.m.

Prof. Larry LeDuc

Yes, okay.

2:45 p.m.

Research Director, Canada's Changing Federal Community, Institute for Research on Public Policy

Dr. Leslie Seidle

I lean towards a referendum for an eventual model. I realize that's answering in the abstract and without any consideration of what might happen between today and some point later on in the process. I do so for a couple of reasons, one is a question of democratic legitimacy.

The New Zealanders did it in a country that is smaller and much less complex than Canada. They did it twice, in fact, as my colleague has said. Three provinces did it, and New Brunswick would have done it if there hadn't been a change in government. Premier Lord had committed to putting the model recommended by the commission to a vote, but that didn't ever occur.

I want to respond just very quickly to the view that a referendum is an automatic way of killing reform. First of all, I find it's rather cynical. I think it sets aside the democratic legitimacy arguments and reduces everything to a question of political tactics, but more importantly, there are important counter-examples. In British Columbia, 57% voted in favour of reform. It didn't happen, because the government had said it had to have a 60% majority. It would have happened in a simple majority system.

In New Zealand in the first referendum, 85% of voters rejected first past the post. Then they had a second question. They had to choose from four options, and 70% chose mixed member proportional, which was the system that was eventually implemented in New Zealand.